Death of a River Guide Read Free

assembled eyes, a smouldering spiral of smoke descending into the grave. When our collective gaze rose back up from the grave, it was to see Maria Magdalena Svevo’s high heels (that she had bought especially for the occasion) swivel and Maria Magdalena Svevo stride off.
    Ah, Maria Magdalena Svevo, would that you were here now, as I lie drowning, here of all places, on the Franklin River, looking up through aerated water at the slit in the rocks, above which I can make out daylight. It is not very far away, that daylight, and I would, if you were here, tell you how much I want to reach it. Sydney or the bush. Life or death. There are no other choices.
    It makes me laugh to think that after all your smoking it is me rather than you who will die of lung failure. My lungs no longer feel like gigantic balloons burning up with a fierce fire. Well, that is not entirely correct, they still feel that way, but it no longer worries me; indeed, my mind has become entirely separate from the pain and is drifting in strange jerky motions like the air bubbles I can see above me, darting first this way, then, as if seized by some powerful magnetic current, tumbling the opposite way. Like those bubbles, my thoughts seem to have no specific direction, as much as I try to fix them on one point and move them along the path it indicates. The fire in my lungs I observe like a campfire in the receding distance, and my mind passes on to matters of much more immediate import, matters which, if they are still incomplete, if I remain unable to follow through, I still at least see with a clarity that I never possessed at the time they took place.
    And then, before I can think it, I know.
    I have been granted visions .
    Suddenly it is clear what is happening to me.
    I, Aljaz Cosini, river guide, have been granted visions .
    And immediately I am unbelieving. I say to myself, This is not possible, I have entered the realm of the fabulous, of hallucinations, for there is no way that anybody stuck drowning could experience such things. But contradicting my rational mind is a knowledge that I was never previously aware of possessing. And the rational mind can only reason against that knowledge: that the spirit of the sleeping and the dying in the rainforest roam everywhere, see everything; that we know a great deal more about ourselves than we ever normally care to admit, except at the great moments of truth in our life, in love and hate, at birth and death. Beyond these moments our life seems as if it is one great voyage away from the truths we all encompass, our past and our future, what we were and what we will return to being. And in that journey away our rational mind is our guide, our mentor. But no longer. The rational mind is not persuaded by the knowledge - my knowledge - that everything I am seeing is true, that everything I see has happened. No matter. They may not be the facts of newspapers, but they are truths nevertheless. One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh. But what connects the two? What remains? What abideth in the earth forever?
    I have been granted visions-grand, great, wild, sweeping visions. My mind rattles with them as they are born to me.
    And I must share them, or their magic will become as a burden.

  Two  
    Let me say that I am not surprised by this vision business. Not in the slightest. As far as I know, it runs in the family. Harry was forever having visions, mostly at the end of each week of hard drinking of cider and cheap riesling with Slimy Ted, his old crayfishing skipper. At his weekly barbeque, to which fewer and fewer of us came because of his increasingly erratic and drunken behaviour, Harry would address a whole range of animals who, apart from a few stray cats and mangy dogs, no one else could see, but whom Harry claimed greatly enjoyed the event and with whom, on occasion, he claimed blood relation. Cousin Dan Bevan, whom some members of the family claimed to be mad but who nevertheless